Christopher Ingram Undergraduate Dissertation 2014/15

Deployment of OpenShift Origin to a Data Centre

Supervised by A.Simons

Abstract

Cloud computing refers to the provision of external software and hardware resources on a pay-as-you-go basis, offered over the internet, and contrasts with more traditional approaches to purchasing server hardware and software.  Users benefit from the cloud by being able to deploy applications rapidly, without having to invest a large capital expenditure on servers and infrastructure, but instead paying only for the resources used as an operational expenditure.

A Platform as a Service provides users with an environment in which applications written in various languages can be created, deployed and executed in the cloud.  Applications usually scale both horizontally (in terms of availability) and vertically (in terms of resources) depending on traffic.  OpenShift Origin, the open source platform chosen for deployment in this project, maintains copies of the code for applications in Git repositories, and provides each application with a unique address (URL) on the internet.

Several different approaches are outlined in deploying OpenShift Origin on infrastructure provided by an external company called DataCentred. Use of command line, networking and Unix operating system concepts are discussed in detail, providing a background and starting point for future projects in this area. Some methods achieve more success than others, yielding a functional and scalable platform as a service, making applications available over the internet through a sub-domain name. Extra objectives, including an application for the administration of accounts, are discussed and completed as part of the implementation. Suggestions of further work are explained, aiming to expand the system, mitigate errors encountered during deployment, and generate new areas of research.